VATICAN CITY – Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe will attend tomorrow’s beatification ceremony for the late John Paul II, the Vatican said.
Mr Mugabe, widely criticised for human rights abuses in his country, is banned from travel to the European Union, but the Vatican City is a sovereign state.
Mr Mugabe, a Catholic, will travel through Rome but pacts between Italy and the Vatican stipulate that people heading to the city state cannot be impeded. John Paul’s coffin was exhumed yesterday as tens of thousands of people began arriving in Rome for one of the biggest events since his funeral in 2005.
The Vatican said the coffin was removed from the crypts below St Peter’s Basilica while leading Vatican officials and some of the late pope’s closest aides looked on and prayed.
Those present at the ceremony included Cardinal Stanislaw Dziwisz, his personal secretary and right-hand man for decades, and the Polish nuns who ran the papal household for 27 years.
The wooden coffin will be placed in front of the main altar of St Peter’s Basilica. After tomorrow’s beatification Mass, the basilica will remain open until all visitors who want to view the coffin have done so.
It will then be moved to a new crypt under an altar in a side chapel near Michelangelo’s Pietà sculpture. The marble slab that covered his first burial place will be sent to Poland.
At least several hundred thousand people are expected in St Peter’s Square for the Mass in which John Paul’s successor Pope Benedict XVI will pronounce a Latin formula declaring one of the most popular popes in history a “blessed” of the Catholic Church.